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Monday, May 21, 2012

The Heat is On

I'm really really glad that Little Cuter and SIR are not being married this afternoon. Though there's a breeze, the temperatures are likely to hit triple digits. The sun, recovered from its eclipse, has that summertime thing going on. In short, it's hot.

Not muggy humid sticky hot, like you feel on a July afternoon in Chicago. Not foot scorching toe burning sandy hot, like Jones Beach in August. Not the why won't the fan move the air enough hot of my grandmother's stuffy apartment. No, not any hot like those at all.

This is the hot that bakes you from the inside out. This kind of hot makes your bones feel warm and toasty, as if you're walking around with your own personal heating pad, one molded perfectly to the contours of your self. Nothing is swollen or sticky. It's just hot.

This is the hot that your hair feels. It's down to the roots and out to the tips hot, wet at the sweaty parts but otherwise just radiating warmth. I submerge myself in the deep part of the pool, I pop up, I catch my breath.... and the front and sides of my 'do are dry. It's like living in one of those beauty salon plastic domed dryers. It happens without my noticing.

There are flowers that understand the hot. Getting ready to bloom, during the day, with the sun shining, the tricocerus looks like this

Once the sun sets, the petals open up to this.

Yes, magenta and orange and lavender and yellow and green and I promise, it was real.

It only lasted for a few hours, though.

By the morning, from a distance, it was still fabulous.

But up close, at 6:30am, as the sun rose over the Pusch Ridge, the petals began to lose their lustre.

By the time I'd had breakfast and returned from the gym, there was nothing worth photographing.

6 comments:

I always love it when you post pictures of the plants and flora in the desert. It always amazes me because of my perception of what the desert is--cacti and sand. Goes to show that our perceptions sometimes aren't even close to reality.

Roger Ebert liked "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel". Is it playing in Tucson yet? I noticed you were wondering if there is anything worth leaving the house for. Other than that, all of the movies appear to have been made for the adolescents. I do love that cactus. The RV park where we stay has a few specimens that are old, there are many plants in the group and this year they all bloomed at the same time. Very impressive.